Your hosted Moodle will contain a lot of very important data such as coursework, assignments, grades, and all administrative data, for example users, cohorts, and roles. Therefore, it is vital that you have a good backup strategy in place.
Moodle itself supports two types of backups:
Course-level backups: Course backups are usually run on an ad hoc basis, and only save the selected course. You will learn to create course backups, restore courses, and copy course content using the related course import facility.
Site-level backups: Site backup saves all courses and their related data to a specified location at regular intervals. You will learn how to set this up and recover data from it.
Both mechanisms will be covered in detail before we look at system-level backups, which include Moodle backups (covering the Moodle software itself as well as the data stored in it) and snapshot creation (full system images).
We will conclude the chapter with two applications...